University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

DOES OPEN INNOVATION STREGHTHEN
CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY?
313
MARLEN ARNOLD
Chair of Brewery and Food Industry Management, Technische Universität München,
TUM Business School, 85350 Freising
Abstract
Meanwhile within a multiplicity of companies corporate responsibility can be identified.
However, there is a gap between wording and acting sustainably or responsibly. Nowadays,
stakeholder integration is a main trend for companies to be or act sustainably or responsibly. It
can also be stated that open innovation methods, such as stakeholder dialogues, innovation
workshops, ideas competition, web-communities and toolkits can enable companies to find new
and sustainable solutions and activities to act sustainably and responsibly due to the enlarging of
the knowledge base and opening perspectives in ad-hoc or continuous communication with
consumers and stakeholders. Yet, the question raises: does open innovation really lead to or
strengthen corporate responsibility? All open innovation methods have a different dialogue
orientation and a different level of participation and therefore diverse possibilities to support
corporate responsibility. This study emphasises the strengths and weaknesses of selected open
innovation methods to strengthen corporate responsibility on the basis of an empirical analysis of
6 German-based companies.
Keywords: CR and sustainability, open innovation methods, sustainable innovations
Introduction
One of the critical questions for managers, policy-makers and other stakeholders is
the importance of innovation and organisational learning in order to strengthen
corporate responsibility. To guarantee a “development that meets the needs of the
present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own
needs” (Brundtland 1987) societal change, the creation of new institutions and green
technologies are necessary (Ghosh 2001; Ghoshal et al. 2000). There is a close
connection between sustainability, corporate responsibility (CR) and corporate social
responsibility (CSR), yet there are some main differences. CSR can be defined as a
“concept whereby companies integrate social and environmental concerns in their
business operations and in their interactions with their stakeholders on a voluntary
basis. Being socially responsible does not only mean to fulfill legal expectations, but
also going beyond compliance” (European Commission 2001: 6). CSR activities can
relate to several phenomena, mostly social-ecological issues. CR is broader and
mainly integrates business aspects and business ethics in special. Businesses make
use of CR for several reasons, e.g. promotion, handling risks or cooperating with
stakeholders. Corporate responsibility addresses fundamental challenges to
prevailing business models as companies trying to implement sustainable and social-